TV round-up: Cold Feet, The Fall and Bake Off

DO you remember the Friends Reunited website? The one where you could get in touch with people you hadn’t seen for years and largely be disappointed when you found out you had nothing in common with Trevor from primary school, who you only remember laughing at when he wet himself in assembly, and very little else?

That was what I thought the new incarnation of Cold Feet (ITV, Monday) might feel like after an absence of 13 years; as if the characters who had been so familiar from previous series had turned into distant figures who you only vaguely remember, and aren’t quite as interesting as you thought they were, returning in an unnecessary drama revisit.

I needn’t have worried; the series finished on a high note, wrapping up the series at Adam’s big 49th birthday party (his landlady Tina thought it was his 50th as he was making so much fuss about it), tying up some loose ends, and opening up possibilities for the next series, that’s already been commissioned.

The final episode played out to a background of top middle aged party hits (Hall and Oates, The Clash, Stevie Wonder); Pete and Jenny’s love life problems with an intimate moment in Adam’s bathroom where Viagra had previously failed (“It’s not exactly flattering, it’s chemically induced,” wailed Jenny when she saw the result).

Karen was proposed to by both David and Eddie, and rejected them both whilst they fought on a Twister mat, Pete and Adam had a moment of bloke bonding when they were involved in an off-licence robbery, and the slow-burn romance between Adam and Tina finally started to spark when she ditched her super-smooth married lover.

As well as catching up with old mates, Cold Feet has felt like a breath of fresh air in a TV drama world of period drama (Poldark, Victoria, Tutankhamun) or grim contemporary work (The Missing, Ordinary Lies) – Cold Feet is most people’s lives now; a bit plodding, sometimes with dark moments, but ultimately leavened with humour. John Thomson’s Pete, whose storyline of mid-life depression was so moving, has been the linchpin of the series for me, but I’m looking forward to catching up with them all again in the next series.

PH

The Fall (BBC2, Thurs & Fri)

I wasn’t so keen to welcome back The Fall (BBC2, Thurs & Fri). Being of a violent and vengeful disposition, I was hoping that serial Killer Paul Spector would die of shotgun wounds at the end of the second series, but no, a third series was deemed necessary by BBC2. But not by me. This series has been a trial, not least for the volume button on my remote control. What with Spector (Jamie Dornan) being in hospital with his injuries, and, with a pained look, whispering that he couldn’t remember what he’d done.

His nemesis, Detective Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) was still whispering every single line in meaningful fashion, so my volume button got a right hammering. The subtitles button got a fair amount of use as well, as Wallander star Krister Henriksson’s psychologist Larson was difficult to understand. If only my telly’s ‘brightness’ control could have made John Lynch more cheerful; his Jim Burns always looked on the verge of bursting into tears.

This series of The Fall has been even talkier than the previous two, and it felt like hard going, with little reward. It was only in the last two episodes that things picked up, with the revelation that Spector had been faking memory loss all along, then viciously attacking Gibson in the police interview room.

Spector’s suicide, in an act of autoerotic strangulation – a fantasy he had played out with his victims – didn’t even feel like a kind of justice, but merely made me think “oh”. Spector talking about his mother’s death and the abuse he suffered in children’s homes explained why he became a killer, but still, I couldn’t wait to see his demise.

The enigmatic Stella Gibson revealed a little more of herself too, discussing her father’s death and her own self-harming with Spector’s teenage stalker Katie, but again, too late for me to care. She’ll need to reveal more than an excellent taste in silk shirts for me to watch a spin-off series.

BBC

The Great British Bake Off in its current form has come to an end

Also coming down to the last crumbs this week was The Great British Bake Off (BBC1, Wednesday), at least in its current format before moving to Channel 4. We shall miss Sue Perkins’ innuendoes a-go-go; introducing a meringue crown challenge, she reminded us that the presenters already had “a sponge sceptre and several jellied orbs” between them. Ooh-er, missus etc.

It was clear from that first round that Andrew, he of the mechanical pies, wasn’t going to win, as he wasn’t bestowed with one of Paul Hollywood’s coveted handshakes, which went to Candice and Jane. Glamorous Candice – a PE teacher unlike any one I ever had – took the Bake Off crown in the end, partly due to her sausage rolls made like little piggies, complete with pork crackling tails.

Bless the Bake Off. It’s a solid format that never changes, and is simply about nice people making lovely food that makes viewers happy. God knows what will happen to it when it rises again on Channel 4; I’m all for a presenting team of Paul Hollywood, Rustie Lee and the Dagenham Girl Pipers.

Bake Off winners earn their fame, in On Benefits: Spend It Like Beckham (Channel 5, Thursday) we saw unemployed Jack Johnson who wanted to be famous by borrowing £20,000 to try to look like David Beckham.

The boy didn’t lack ambition, even if he did lack anything like a resemblance to the sportsman. No mere mortal job for our Jack, who has spoken of his desire to be a TV presenter. “I can’t look like David Beckham and work in McDonalds. It doesn’t work.” As Jack bore more of a resemblance to a pudding than a pin-up, perhaps he’ll pop up on the new Bake Off.